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At any rate, the thing itself is indisputable, and has often been commented on. Moreover, this is only half the veery's technical proficiency.
If it has less variety, and perhaps less rapture, than the song of the wood-thrush, it is marked by greater simplicity and ease; and if it does not breathe the ineffable tranquillity of the veery's strain, it comes to my ear, at least, with a still nobler message. The hermit's note is aspiration rather than repose. "Peace, peace!" says the veery, but the hermit's word is, "Higher, higher!"
How many persons have ever tried to answer seriously the old conundrum: "How many straws go to make a bird's nest?" Let us examine critically one nest and see what we find. One spring after a red squirrel had destroyed the three eggs in a Veery's nest which I had had under observation, I determined to study carefully its composition, knowing the birds would not want to make use of it again.
From the forest came the evening hymn of a thrush, the olive-backed perhaps, like but less clear and full than the veery's. In the evening we sat about the fire in rude homemade chairs, and had such broken and disjointed talk as we could manage.
I perceive that in the veery's carolling, the clover's scent, the glistening of the water, the waving wings of butterflies, the sunset tints, the floating clouds, there are attainable infinitely more subtile modulations of delight than I can yet reach the sensibility to discriminate, much less describe.
A writer in the "Atlantic" gravely tells us the wood thrush is sometimes called the hermit, and then, after describing the song of the hermit with great beauty and correctness, coolly ascribes it to the veery! The new Cyclopædia, fresh from the study of Audubon, says the hermit's song consists of a single plaintive note, and that the veery's resembles that of the wood thrush!
Then, as always, it put me in mind of the veery's effort, notwithstanding a certain part of the strain was quite out of the veery's manner, and the whole was pitched in decidedly too high a key.
It was so near the house! so easy to watch! the bird not at all afraid! All the way home we congratulated ourselves. The next morning our first thought was of the veery's nest, and on starting out for the day we turned in that direction. Alas! the old story! The nest was overturned and thrown out of place, the leaves were trampled; there had evidently been a struggle of some kind.
He is not much in the books. Indeed, I am acquainted with scarcely any writer on ornithology whose head is not muddled on the subject of our three prevailing song-thrushes, confounding either their figures or their songs. The new Cyclopaedia, fresh from the study of Audubon, says the hermit's song consists of a single plaintive note, and that the veery's resembles that of the wood thrush!
till my soul was filled with rapture, and a longing to know him in his home relations took such possession of me that the world seemed to hold but one object of desire, a veery's nest. Yet though the woods were full of them, so wary and so wise were the little builders that not a nest could I find. I studied the descriptions in the books; I examined the nests in a collection at hand.
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